The Asian Age: Shankar Roychowdhury
“There Is an increasing belief that Pakistanis walk both sides of the road”.
US senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, as reported in the Wall Street Journal Rumblings of discontent in the United States are growing louder post-Osama bin Laden and Abbottabad. The US is a dissatisfied paymaster, because its huge financial investments in Pakistan by way of military and civil aid are simply not paying off, with little value to show for American tax payers’ money expended. The US remains the most reviled hate figure in Pakistani public opinion, rivalling and sometimes even exceeding India. Pakistanis, both in the Army as well as civil society, are happy to bite the hand that feeds them, because misuse and misappropriation of American funds is now considered almost an article of faith and part of the antiAmerica jihad in that country.
There is really nothing much the Americans can do except fume about their admittedly unenviable situation, because there is only so much influence the US can exert on its dubious “ally”, particularly on the taboo subject of accounting for funds received. Pakistan can almost imperiously brush aside inconvenient American importunities, because it holds two trump cards -first, potential hostages in the 150,000 US troops who have “surged” into Afghanistan and are now locked into that country, dependent solely on a single route of maintenance (and, who knows, withdrawal) running entirely through Pakistan, from Karachi to Kabul via the Khyber Pass, and to Kandahar via Chaman.
Pakistan’s intransigencies can easily shut down this surface lifeline whenever Pakistan needs to make a point about who is really in charge, and indeed sometimes does so just to give a turn of the screw to its American “partners”. The other high card is Pakistan’s feverishly expanding stockpile of nuclear weapons and enriched plutonium likely to soon exceed that of France. Here, too, Pakistan blackmails its reluctant American benefactors by holding a gun to its own head with dire prognostications of a nuclear implosion if America withdraws aid. Pakistan’s indispensability is further rubbed in by ostentatious visits to China just to remind the benighted Americans that the US is not the only donor around! Meanwhile, the financial aspects of the US-Pakistan joint venture in AfPak, as depicted in some foreign media, make for interesting -and ominous -reading. Amongst them is the Kerry-Lugar Bill, legislatively codified by US in 2009 as “The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act” with the stated aim of “the development of an enhanced strategic partnership with Pakistan and its people”.
The act provides for economic and military aid to Pakistan by the US to the extent of $7.5 billion over five financial years (2009-2013) to be utilised for economic and social development, as well as military assis tance and arms transfers for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism as part of the war on terror.
In addition, former US President George W. Bush also created the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) after 9/11, under which Washington has provided $8.87 billion to Islamabad as running expenses for undertaking the war on terror against the Taliban in AfPak on behalf of the US. These funds are deposited directly into the Pakistan treasury, with very little American control over its expenditure thereafter, even though there are provisions for American oversight, including annual certification by the US secretary of state that such funds are being spent in accordance with the prescribed pre-conditions. Nothing much is heard thereafter, presumably because of an escape hatch clause that dispenses with such certification “if in the national interest”. However, authorities within the American government freely comment that only 30 per cent of CSF resources for Pakistan are being expended for their intended purpose, while the remainder 70 per cent of funds are apparently unaccounted for, and might well have been expended for “anything from F16 fighter aircraft to a new house for an Army general”. In Islamabad, the Pakistan government submits monthly bills for an average $80 million to the US embassy on account of ongoing but unspecified military operations for which no receipts are given.
The US and Pakistan are said to be actively sparring behind closed doors in Washington and Islamabad over this unending Niagara of American funds on account of services contracted for but not rendered. The Pakistan Army submits requests for funds which are either unsubstantiated, exaggerated, or not pertaining to the war on terror, while reports in influential sections of American media indicate that more than 40 per cent of such claims against alleged logistical expenditure on military equipment, food, water and military accommodation are almost routinely rejected in Washington as being inflated.
On one check, these amounted to about $3.2 million between January 2009 to June 2010.
Some examples are hilarious -the US paid millions of dollars to refurbish four Pakistani helicopters for operational deployment of troops against the Taliban and other militants. The Pakistan Army diverted three of the refurbished helicopters to the Pakistani UN peacekeeping force in Sudan, for which Pakistan receives compensation from the United Nations! In another instance, in 2006, the Pakistan Army claimed almost $70 million for maintenance of air defence radar sets, presumably against the Taliban air threat! These are, of course, the lighter sides of the financial chicanery institutionalised by the Pakistan Army, but there are darker, more serious implications for India of financial assistance by the US to our rogue neighbour. The refurbished helicopters diverted to Sudan might well have been sent to Kashmir, while radar coverage against air strikes by the Taliban is undoubtedly deployed along Pakistan’s eastern borders facing India.
The Pakistan military, as always, is undoubtedly doing well out of America’s war on terror. But as election year approaches in the US, and the country remains convalescent after its near-death economic meltdown, America will have to find answers to the dilemma of funding its demanding and unscrupulous ally.
GEN. SHANKAR ROYCHOWDHURY is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament
(The views expressed above are the personal views of the author)
